Here http://bit.ly/twittermemory are some thoughts of mine that could be suggestions for improving persistance of valuable informations, and also for creating a forgetting feature.
As in biological systems, selective forget is a fundamental necessity in developing selective attention, which in turn is one of the fundamental necessities of consciousness.

marco (@mgua on twitter)

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Venessa writes:

Hi Marco,
I read your post, and I agree that those features would greatly help with search and filtering content.
The only thing that I keep going back and forth about with filtering is, will too much of it make us miss something?
For instance, I still can’t figure out who to follow back. Some people have content that interests me, but is not related to understanding emerging media and technology trends, which is my focus. So I don’t follow them because I don’t want to be distracted, but at the same time, sometimes you get valuable insights from areas outside of your field of interest.
If I surround myself with information that’s self-reinforcing, will I be a victim to groupthink? I don’t want to lose my focus, but I also don’t want to miss the opportunity for a-ha moments.
what do you think?

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Marco writes:

Excellent point, Venessa

Personally, being very involved with my job, I feel worry not to have enough time to investigate and follow and learn and enjoy what I like.
Oh, yes, I would like to devote time to Artificial Intelligence, Life evolution, Science, and future studies, as well as philosophy and psychology…
And it is really difficult to choose, because every choice you make determines forever your future.

Maybe we will develop faster clocks, or larger sensing bandwidths, but the fundamental problem will remain. Selective attention is needed for whatever useful and successful result.
We need to focus our lens, to really heat our target.

It is nice to work social, and to romatically think that future will be crowd-sourced, but I am sufficiently old to know that really hard work is needed to build something. And undirected people do not work.

To put it hard way: A bunch of bored people tweeting about the last juicy website they found is not going to actively build something. Scientists and entrepeneurs are needed for this. People who actually likes to invent and make and get their hands and minds dirty with details.

Self contemplation is risky, as well as pure philosophy. We need to find the right balance between the introverse attitude, like Leonardo Da Vinci, a great mind working alone – centuries in advance of his times, and a perfect orchestra of performers holistically directed.

Directors are needed.
In most cases, sadly, crowds are sums of zeroes.

Directors needs to be protected and heavily filtered, to be proficient.